My ice cream making parcours - part one

Don't get me wrong. I have always loved ice cream - and I still do. Somehow, my mother's purchase of an ice cream machine a few years back (I don't recall seeing her using it) has completely changed my view on frozen desserts.

We started small, with the machine's booklet. It used to puzzle me. I would flip through it's pages, wondering how the end results would be like because I couldn't consider using that many eggs, or that ingredient. Basically, our sorbetière was used to get rid of the too numerous raspberries that grew in the backyard when we were getting tired of making jam. After a failed attempt at following one of those received recipes, our trick began to purée the fruits, sieve them, add sugar and a random amount of yoghurt. This resulted on ubersour rock hard sherbets (somehow, we always managed to eat them all). One day, I don't really remember how, I decided to cook the coulis before working with it. It was a little better but still not what I wanted. I eventually tried two recipes in there (vanilla and chocolate, I think) but gave up anyway because those micro batches called for too many ingredients.

I spent a month in Montréal, at an aunt's in the summer of 2001. We were having a great time trying new food - especially oreos and New York-style pizza -, checking out bookstores. A couple of days before flying back to Belgium, I found this awesome book called Ice Cream and Iced Desserts by Joanna Farrow/Sara Lewis, and bought it straight away because it was cheap, in english and had metric and volume measurements. The pictures were so elegant - and intimidating as well, but I bought it anyway.